The syllabus will be tuned according to the backgrounds of the seminar participants. The practical goal will be to create video synthesis instruments as new states of matter that respond to live movement (or sensor data) in alchemical ways. This parallels the study of alchemy acting on the border between the natural and artificial.
DATE |
TOPIC |
Studio-Lab |
Friday Sep 9 |
Introduction: translations from alchemy, computational physics to computational media: calligrahic video. Overview of materials. |
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Friday Sep 16 |
Alchemy and History of Early Chemistry (selections from Newman) |
1:30-3:30 Max Intro environment, help patches, tutorials - looking at several ways to do the same task (statistics over a list?) - floating average patch, ways to THINK in max, flow of execution |
Friday Sep 23 |
Alchemy (selections from Newman). Perfective art, transformation. In what sense can we interpret alchemical art (in the pre-modern sense) for contemporary computational media? |
Jitter Intro: - how to get video in and out, pwindows, spilling values, dimensions - lighting your subject, saturation, contrast, rgb2luma, - other simple jitter objects |
Friday Sep 30 |
Recap alchemical debates. Metaphor vs Physics. Simulation and Computational Calligraphic Media; between natural and artificial. |
1:30-4:00 Major - motion traching: frame differencing, cv.jit, - debugging matrix data, - downsampling, + using flow of control tricks |
Friday Oct 7 |
Metaphors and physics of Heat, Diffusion, Irreversibility. Introduction to PDE's and Lattice computation. |
1:30--4 - operations on matrices, memory and writing data - physics simulation modelling |
Friday Oct 14 |
Making Water. Introduction to Laplace equation (electrostatic), elliptic and hyperbolic PDE. |
- possible discussion day, |
Friday Oct 21 |
MIDTERM PRESENTATIONS |
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Friday Oct 28 |
Student presentations of readings |
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Friday Nov 4 |
Making galaxies: Introduction to interacting particle systems, gravity. Atomist vs. Plenist Cosmologies. |
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Friday Nov 11 |
studio lab; possible jitter lesson 4: writing a jitter external | |
Monday Nov 14 |
Bernard Maubrey Visiting Artist Talk, 19:30-21:30, York theater, EV, Concordia | |
Tuesday Nov 15 |
Bernard Maubrey demonstration11:00-13:00, TML | |
Friday Nov 18 |
Student presentations of readings, Group 3 introduction to physics and computaitonal physics |
Glass, magnets and other models: Magnetic Material, Glass, Turbulence: Introduction to Complex Dynamics, Ising spin glass, Schrodinger wave, or Navier-Stokes. |
Friday Nov 25 |
Student presentations of readings, Group 4; Re: David Rokeby physics and / vs. video, simulation vs. allegory |
possibly Stan Brakhage, Woody and Steina Vasulka (, David Rokeby) |
Material poetry, phase space, translation, transformation and transubstantiation. In what sense can we interpret alchemical art (in the pre-modern sense) for contemporary performance? (Readings from Artaud) Animation and regions between life and non-life. |
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Friday Dec 2 |
FINAL PROJECT PRESENTATIONS |
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Friday Dec 9 |
ALTERNATE PROJECT PRESENTATIONS |
The grade will be determined by: 1/3 in-class contributions/presentations, 1/3 Midterm project / paper, and 1/3 Final project / paper.
The seminar will expect different contributions from students appropriate to their expertise and interest. Some will write papers, some will create computational video instruments. For students who want to do computational media, it'll be a chance to master Jitter realtime video. For students with some real computational chops, it'll be a chance to apply some computational physics to video synthesis. The final projects will be done in teams of 2 (3 by permission), and should present a novel form of responsive video informed by alchemical practices. The metaphorical and conceptual content should be described in a brief (less than 9 pages) paper accompanying the software or sketch.